Category Archives: Non classé

I gave a half-hour summary of my sensorimotor approach to consciousness at the (virtual) “Forum de Sciences Cognitives”. It was followed by about 20 minutes of questions. The title was “Le faux problème de la conscience et la conscience imminente … Continue reading →

“FEEL” was a six-year ERC Advanced project led by J. Kevin O’Regan at the Université Paris Descartes, devoted to testing and developing the “sensorimotor” approach to consciousness. This approach purports to explain the “hard” problem of understanding the nature of … Continue reading →

Can we make robots that feel? Shall we “retire” Rigoberto? Many people believe that there are certain typically human capacities that machines will never possess, among them: (1) proper general intelligence, (2) a sense of self, and (3) real “feel”. … Continue reading →

Kevin O’Regan gave a one-hour talk in French on Consciousness and Sensorimotor Approach at Paris Descartes University on February 4th 2019. You can watch or download it here.

The first “object” that newborn children play with is their own body. This activity allows them to autonomously form a sensorimotor map of their own body and a repertoire of actions supporting future cognitive and motor development. Here we propose … Continue reading →

In line with the sensorimotor contingency theory, we investigate the problem of the perception of space from a fundamental sensorimotor perspective. Despite its pervasive nature in our perception of the world, the origin of the concept of space remains largely … Continue reading →

Tactile speech aids, though extensively studied in the 1980’s and 1990’s, never became a commercial success. A hypothesis to explain this failure might be that it is difficult to obtain true perceptual integration of a tactile signal with information from … Continue reading →

The aim of this article is to track the fetal origin of infants’ sensorimotor behavior. We consider development as the self-organizing emergence of complex forms from spontaneously generated activity, governed by the innate capacity to detect and memorize the consequences … Continue reading →

Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature … Continue reading →

In this meeting, we aim to clarify the concepts that underlie current approaches to understanding how human body knowledge develops from birth onwards, with a focus on what we call the “sensorimotor approach” – the idea that body knowledge must … Continue reading →